Sevilla's Hat Trick

During my overseas student exchange in Linkoping University, I had the pleasure to meet 2 Spanish friends - Maria and Anna - across several classes; they were from a town called Seville and to be honest as a football fan, I cannot help but to think of Sevilla FC - a football club based in the very same town.

(P.S when you think of Europa League, you will subconsciously think of Sevilla FC)

Just this week, Sevilla claimed their 3rd consecutive UEFA Europa League title - what is deemed by some critics as a second tier European knockout competition after the Champions League - by beating Liverpool FC. In light of these victories, Unai Emery, their current manager, has managed the club well in spite of selling their top players and keeping root in nurturing home-grown talents like Coke and Soria.

As an aspiring data miner, I acknowledged that it is hard to ascertain particular factors attributing to their hat trick of Europa League glories. Still I have identified a handful of possible factors which may led up to their triumphs; in order to facilitate simpler readability through bit-sized information, I will disseminate the various influences across several posts starting with this one.

Pretty much a 'no-brainer', this post is about the association between league matches in the La Liga and Europa League matches. As there has been a growing importance to focus on league matches in order to secure future revenue through television rights and sponsors, excelling in the Europa League has been neglected as compared to the luxurious Champions League. Thus, the constant struggle to juggle both competitions (along with other domestic cup competitions) has prompted many football clubs in the major big European football leagues to just plainly allocate their best resources to their league matches and stray from the Europa League.

While this seem like a moot point, I believe that this association still plays a part - big or small I cannot ascertain - in Sevilla's victories across the last 3 seasons. So let's get down to it!

With regards to the La Liga, a 7th position place in the league would generally entail an Europa League qualifying round placing invitation considering the domestic cup Copa del Rey has been largely dominated by Barcelona and Real Madrid, who are de facto no strangers to the Champions League via their high league position and consequently Champions League qualifications; as such, the last Europa League berth (qualifying round) is often passed down to the 7th placed team in the league.

Across the last three seasons (2013-14, 2014-15, 2015-16), Sevilla finished on a high securing European competition for their next season. The following graph is the spectrum of Sevilla's league position across 38 games; more than shedding light on the divergence of their league ranking, this graph implies the level of difficulty and competition of the Spanish football premier league which may influence their performance in the Europa League; based on the current line of thought, the tougher the league, there might be a growing possibility to ditch the Europa league.

In the 2013-14 and 2015-16 season, Sevilla's league predicament is rather constant ranging from a 20th to a 5th position. This has several implications: first, being in a temporal state of being last in the league does not spell a self-fulfilling disastrous season; second, it is clear that the league is dominated by at least 2 or 3 or even 4 teams considering how Sevilla can only managed a high of 5th position; lastly, the entry to Europa League competition might be seemingly well distributed across mid-tier teams since big clubs like Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid tend to dominate the top spots in the league. On a side note, Sevilla ended up 5th and 7th position in the 2013-14 and 2015-16 season respectively.

In the 2014-15 season, Sevilla performed well in the league which may consequently explain their short spectrum of a 10th to 5th position (they finished 5th); their strong performance in the league is reflective of their dominance in the Europa League which I will highlight in the next post.

Another interesting observation about Sevilla across the last 3 seasons - related to the important 7th position - is that after matchday 18, the Sevillistas tend to hover in this position without dropping beyond 7th place.

Since game 18 is situated around roughly half way of the season, this might entail that Sevilla pick up their winning momentum around this time. Hence in the long run, this run will spill over to their European matches as well; it comes to no surprise that form plays a vital role in football - with that said, the timing of the winning form is worth exploring in the future. Back to Sevilla, as much as the European berth spots are highly contested, constantly being in the zone provides a greater concentration in European competitions which is ear marked as a potential factor in Sevilla's triumphs so far.

Now that we have a short discussion about the association between the league matches in the La Liga and the Europa League matches. I will end it here and discuss more about the data trends I have extracted and computed across the last 3 seasons.

On a side note, one interesting fact is that Sevilla has always fallen back to the Europa League considering how the winner of Europa League is promised a guaranteed spot in the Champions League group stages. In both 2014-15 and 2015-16 season, Sevilla ended up 3rd in their group which propels them to the knock out stages of the Europa League.

If this might sound like a endless cycle, it smells like it.